Archive for the ‘Ashley Roach’ Category

Blood Diary / Deer Song Loneliness sneaks, succeeds only when full on blood and berries – the feast of the lonely on a Saturday evening. On a Sunday, no one answers. Framed in suntan and a problem: there it is – the lonely. Every other is another I used to know fully. In the deer [...]

Memphis Song I will turn in Memphis. Hear its heavy lungs. I will not lighten its load. It will not call my name. Ask for it. Ask til it remembers your name. Ask for the singing of your heavy name. Black lines hold up. White lines too. Bloodbread calls your heavy name.

Writing Song Tuneless singing, humming humming. Blood or bread, black lines hold you up, white lines too. Cradle it and spit – make text. Ask for the poem as the morning asks for you. Ask for the singing ask. Ask until the word loses meaning.

Train Dream (Crusoe in America) An island blooms inside, bloody, a flood of islands. Capture the islands – American as hell, American as trains running through bedrooms (where we go trains will follow (when I first, when I first heard train crash clatter, I thought America was ending)). Was I absent from the ocean? Pack [...]

Early Dark Song Jaw is aching, the writing slow. How to ache, the belly knows. The jaw can’t find a way. In habit unsure. Dark just grows. Oh aching, come and make me a cauldron of thoughts (a mouthful of snakes). Shantih shantih, come and find me, I am lost. Inhabit the missing light.

This is another older poem. At the time, I felt like this was really close to Poetry. Now it reminds me of my tiny one bedroom apartment in Hattiesburg. The Weight Control is a ventriloquist. Kitten, hush this mittened mouth. Better To bend the morning back. Monday, you do yourself too well. The weight is an open [...]

Salted Apples Salt engages the palate- a way to purge the sweet of a misnomer red delicious or a too soon watermelon, pale to the rind. I understand it: skin and sweet, tongue and seed, peach fingers kissing, reaching. You play piano. Keys dip under fingers pressing. The chords are salted apples – Gershwin, honeycrisp [...]

Because the muse up and left me this week, I decided to share a poem I wrote in workshop at the lovely young age of 23 about up and leaving my muse. At the time, when I didn’t know what to write about, I would confer with Gertrude (sometimes Mildred), an older jaded imaginary woman [...]

Domestic Sinister The relief of stretching flesh, the turning of fall – lantana begonia. Caterpillar. What will you do if your bird bones break? Gutted and uncomfortable. But some new ones are beautiful and sing! Gorgeous clementines with purpled poppy lips. I fear the worst and want for you one that sings (in the narrow [...]

Stroke Call Giver away of things, mender, meddler of family weight. Now still, stroke-bound, not giving. Loss and guilt – typical: a grandparent grown tiresome with the giving away of unwanted things. My house is not unlike hers, the hand-sewn quilts. She was busy despite her failing hands, always doing. I like to be still. [...]

Submissive, In Charcoal originally printed in Product 19, 2004 The professor traces the rising warmth of my spine with the dull end of his charcoal. He addresses the artists: Notice the contrast between the line of her shoulders – here – and the roundness of her thighs – there. The breath inside my still-life pose [...]

Kudzu Restless as the interstate, it creeps one foot a day – an exponential reach that sings. Suburban nostalgia ignites a sparkler in my belly: glorious green ruin! Near this hill is a house rendered in kudzu: the furniture arranged, the piano waiting for fingers. “Death is always at work,” I remember. Invading the invasive, [...]